On several occasions the poet, who lived at Farringford, near by, while taking his daily constitutional, came and leant upon the garden gate, evidently charmed with the beauty of the place. The old thatched roof and the quaint attractiveness of the cottage might well have given rise to reflections in less imaginative minds than that of a poet.
I had not the opportunity of studying Tennyson’s features at that time; but my wife, coyly hidden in a favourite spot in the garden, was able to observe him closely. Being herself an artist of no mean ability, she thus afforded me considerable help in the production of his portrait.
It seems strange that perhaps the most reclusive of men should have unwittingly come forward and posed, as it were, at the very door of the artist who was then desirous of obtaining sittings.
One day, while I was at work in the studio on Tennyson, I was visited by Father Haythornthwaite, rector of the Catholic Church at Freshwater. The priest was greatly interested, and he must have conveyed to the poet the intelligence that I was about to place his figure in Madame Tussaud’s, for very shortly afterwards I learned that Tennyson was particularly desirous that I should bear in mind that, in spite of his four-score years, he had not a grey hair in his head—a touch of nature that seemed to me particularly human.
A nice but unintentional compliment was paid to one of our tableaux about this time by the present King, when he was Duke of York. We complied with a request to furnish a representation of the scene of the death of Nelson in the cockpit of the Victory for the Royal Naval Exhibition at Chelsea in May, 1891. This tableau was founded on the famous picture by Devis, which found a permanent home at Greenwich Hospital in 1825; and it was very well received by the visitors to the Exhibition. The compliment to which I allude was not heard by me, but it was reported in the Press at the time that the Duke of York, while looking at the tableau, exclaimed, “Why, this beats Tussaud’s!”
The tableau has been in our Exhibition ever since, and is a great favourite with all. When the present Prince of Wales and his brother Albert paid us a visit, the Sailor Prince looked long and intently at the historic scene. Both boys were also a good deal moved as they gazed on the tableau showing the murder of the two little princes in the Tower of London—a representation over which many impressionable people have been unable to keep dry eyes.
SIR RICHARD BURTON